About Karl and Carla
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Karl was born May 30th, 1965, in Battle Creek, Michigan, home of Tony the Tiger, after which his parents (Syd and Fred Minor) immediately stopped having children.  At the age of two, he packed up and moved to Bossier City, Louisiana, to be closer to his fiancee, whom he would meet 18 years later.    Sometime around the age of seven, he moved to Hawaii for about 18 months to get better reception of the TV show Hawaii-Five-O, with his parents and three siblings (Mel, Bruce, and Rena, in tow).   Returning to Bossier, his formative years were wasted on model airplanes, photography, and reading.  He has vague memories of attending Bossier High School and making noises on a trumpet in the band, after which he attended Louisiana State University in Shreveport to avoid having to move out of the parents' house.  Somewhere in this time period, he turned into a computer geek and began talking to computers.   Fortunately, this later evolved into a paying job, although it did nothing for his social skills. Photo of Karl
Photo of Carla Meanwhile, Carla was born December 2nd, 1968 in New Orleans, and moved a few months later (her parents, John and Carol Hall, helped with this) to Shreveport, Louisiana.    Her childhood, which she shared with her younger sister Cathryn, was spent swimming, listening to music, reading, writing, and camping with the parents.  She attended  Caddo Magnet High School to learn calligraphy, and later Louisiana State University in Shreveport, where both her parents were on the faculty.   In the Spring of 1985, she took a second trip to Europe with a school-sponsored group led by her parents.  As it turns out, this tour was open to people from all walks of life, including computer geeks, and Carla happened upon the aforementioned Karl in the Frankfurt airport.  She was able to dismiss the unnerving fact that she had spotted him earlier on the plane from Shreveport reading Rambo: First Blood Part 2, and engaged him in thoroughly unmemorable conversation.   In a subsequent mind-boggling lowering of standards, she dated him for five years, then married him when they had both graduated from college and had nothing better to do.
Since the number of multi-storied buildings and computers waiting to be programmed in Louisiana are limited, Karl and Carla moved to Dallas around  1990, where Karl began working for Texas Instruments, which has many computers for Karl to talk to.
In February of 1995, Karl and Carla opened their home to a very strange Border Collie puppy named Hazie, whose favorite pastimes are herding her remote-control truck, jumping at bubbles, chasing flashlight and laser-pointer beams, and, of course, retrieving tennis balls and taking the food-source bipeds for walks. Photo of Carla

Karl and Carla's house is a modest pixel in the high-resolution sprawl of suburban Dallas.   To the left is a panoramic view of the front yard.   Click and drag the mouse pointer left or right on the image to see the whole picture.  If it doesn't work quite right for you, it's probably because your browser doesn't have Java or you have it disabled. (Thanks to Sven Meier, from whom I stole the Java Panorama code.  The panorama was created from 16 separate pictures using the Panorama Factory software).